Fifty years ago, French gastronomy reigned as the aspirational cuisine of choice—for restaurant diners and for home cooks. But we were in the dark ages when it came to regional Italian cooking. We didn’t know about fresh pasta or why the shape of the pasta is as important as the ingredients in the sauce. We’d never heard of pesto or risotto or pancetta. Hell, we didn’t even know Parmesan from Parmigiano-Reggiano.
All of these remained a faraway mystery to the average eater. And then one woman changed it all and turned us all into amateur Italians. You may know her because of certain dishes of hers that have come to be deified. Lemon roast chicken. Tomato, butter, and onion sauce. Her Bolognese. Probably you know her simply by her first name:
Marcella.
I start in Helsinki. With a population of just 630,000, this is a pocket-sized, but delightful capital city, buzzing with a Nordic foodie scene, a clutch of tech startups and its own design aesthetic, all bathed in up to 19 hours a day of sunlight in the summer. Over coffee at Nolita, his zero-waste restaurant and bakery, Serbian-born chef Luca Basic tells me that he came to Helsinki aged 19 and immediately decided to stay. So, what’s happiness in the city? He doesn’t hesitate. “It’s trust in the state. It goes beyond things like buses being on time, or my staff being able to afford to live in the middle of their city.”
You can't bury your dead in San Francisco. In 1900, all new internments were banned within city limits. By the next decade, the land was too valuable for corpses. All existing cemeteries were evicted, the bodies dug up and sent 13 miles south to the town of Colma, where the dead population now outnumbers the living 1,000 to one. Most of the bodies ended up in mass graves. Private reburial cost a premium. The tombstones that were recoverable after the massive dig, and which families did not repurchase from the city, were ground and used in public works. They now line rain gutters in Buena Vista Park, make up the breakwater in the Marina, and are used for erosion barriers at Ocean Beach.